


you're ripped at every edge but you're a masterpiece

by cloudtalking



Category: Green Creek Series - T.J. Klune
Genre: Abuse, Angst, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Emotional Abuse, Meta, Tattoos, Torture Mentions, for the wolfing valentines gift exchange, robert livingstone is a dick, sad sad bois, way too many uses of the word unkindness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 03:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13673079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudtalking/pseuds/cloudtalking
Summary: for @bloodwrit for the prompts: gordo/mark plus new tattoos“You are unkind and unlovable,” were Gordo's mother’s last words to him. He then made himself into an unkindness, doodling feathered beasts in the margins of his schoolwork until he perfected the design.





	you're ripped at every edge but you're a masterpiece

**Author's Note:**

> hahaha this is straight up angst but it has a happy ending at least?? stay tuned

I.

 

Gordo Livingstone is a canvas, a masterpiece of his own making. He was born blank, no words on the page, no colors on his skin to add to the brown.

 

The first color was red, a tear in the paper across his arm that labeled him as damaged, unmarketable to other artists. His father had been the maestro of the sabotage, signing his work with a black eye and a threat that kept Gordo’s lips sewn shut.

 

Gordo Livingstone is a canvas, but he is also an artist in his own right. He was a self-made witch, a self-made mechanic, and he would be a self-made work of art if he so pleased.

 

“You are unkind and unlovable,” were his mother’s last words to him. He then made himself into an unkindness, doodling feathered beasts in the margins of his schoolwork until he perfected the design.

 

His second color was black, ink dark as midnight covering up the stray red streaks his father had left in his rages.

 

This was noticed. He was immediately labeled as _troublemaker_ by his instructors and _adrenaline junkie_ by his peers. He was sixteen.

 

It was funny, how no one had seen him before and come up with _victim._ He wasn’t so sure he wanted them to anyway.

 

II.

 

Gordo is covered in the ashes of the fire his father had set to their lives, the embers not quite cool. His mother was cold in her grave by the time he’d snapped, the break so gradual and slow it didn’t make a sound when he broke apart.

 

The pack was so shocked, so betrayed. The remaining members couldn’t wrap their heads around it.

 

Robert Livingstone fell so easily to monsterdom, to whatever held the magic that separated them from humans.

 

“His tether was his wife,” they said.

“She was killed some time ago,”

“He must’ve suffered for months, must’ve gone insane from the loss,”

“Even witches go feral when they lose what keeps them human,”

 

Gordo wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He does neither, staring blankly at the walls in the parlor of the Main House. They’d all holed up there, trying to count survivors.

 

Robert Livingstone had always been a monster.

 

Gordo leaves in the night and comes back with claw marks and fire on his shoulders, more shades of red and orange to paint his skin.

 

He comes back with initials etched into his ribs, a reminder that Robert Livingstone was not a bogeyman restrained only to his son.

 

He comes back with a hard set in his jaw, with a determination to prove himself.

 

He comes back to a pack that rarely ever goes near him. If his father went mad without a tether, how far from the tree would the apple fall?

 

III.

 

Gordo is seventeen before anyone looks at him and thinks _lovable._

 

“You’re beautiful,” Mark whispers softly, hands roaming on expertly inked skin. Gordo loves him so much it hurts.

 

Mark traces the ravens that migrate south of his shoulders, that spread their wings across his back and claw at each other for room. He admires the death toll on Gordo’s ribs, leaves his own scratches in the claw marks that run down his back, sucks a bruise into the fire that curls around his neck.

 

He kisses the scars he finds hidden underneath, worships Gordo like a priest at an altar.

 

“You are everything,” Gordo says, voice hoarse. The truth of it is echoed in every part of himself.

 

Mark kisses him on the mouth, bites his own smears of red into Gordo’s lips. He’s proud to bear Mark’s brand on his skin the next morning, proud to be looked at and thought of as _well-loved._

 

IV.

 

“When I was maybe six, my father gave me this,” Mark says, holding up a small statue of a wolf. It’s carved from some sort of quartz, a combination of pale purples and pinks that Gordo can’t help but be entranced by. “He told me to give it to the person I wanted to be with forever, that I’d know who it was when I did, that I could feel it in my bones.”

 

“Mark,” Gordo trails off, words escaping him like smoke between his fingers.

 

“It’s not just in my bones,” Mark continues. “It’s in my heart, in my blood, in my veins. Every part of me wants to keep you. I want you to be mine, but I want to be yours too, I want this to be yours.”

 

Cool stone is being pressed against Gordo’s fingers. He barely registers it in his hands, feeling too heavy and too light all at once.

 

“Mark, I—“ he blinks away tears, practiced even now in keeping them from falling. “I’m yours.”

 

Gordo isn’t quite pale enough to pull off the exact coloring of the wolf, but he does get the outline of it traced right above his heart, filled in with deep purples and magentas.

 

Mark unbuttons his shirt a few nights later and freezes, hands hovering just above the ink. Gordo nods.

 

He doesn’t put his shirt back on for a long while after that.

 

“You got a tattoo.”

 

Mark nods.

 

“On your neck.”

 

Mark nods.

 

“Of a raven.”

 

Mark nods again, mouth curving into a smirk. Gordo feels at the same time blessed and double-crossed, having what he’d done to Mark done onto him.

 

“Any more than one would be an unkindness,” Mark informs him, moving close enough to touch. “Or so I’ve been told. I wouldn’t want to wish myself anything more unkind than you.”

 

“There is nothing more unkind than me,” Gordo promises. He bites into Mark’s neck hard just to prove it, marking him just below the raven.

 

Mark, for all his talk, didn’t seem to mind much at all.

 

VI.

 

“Where’s your macho man, jefe?” Riko prods, throwing Gordo a smirk fit for a snake.

 

Recently, thanks to a certain Latino, Gordo had remembered the sacredness of locked doors. Nowhere was safe from intruders, it seemed; even his own office.

 

Rico had instantly clued in to the actions of the room’s occupants, wiggling his eyebrows and sprinting away before Gordo could nail him with a stack of paperwork larger than his face.

 

Mark had kept Rico too occupied to hunt him down after that, a fact that he should be eternally grateful for.

 

“Shut the fuck up,” Gordo orders.

 

“Anything for you, boss man.” Rico salutes him with a grin. Gordo groans, cursing himself for hiring the kid in the first place.

 

Chris and Tanner join him in laughing, the sound following Gordo as he steps back into his office and slams the door behind him.

 

Chains cover his forearms now, three strands braided together and trailing down each arm. One is of metal, the other of flowers, and the last of vines and wood. Ravens perch on every otherwise negative space, expanding Gordo’s very own unkindness.

 

His party of one becomes a family of four, spreading their wings and letting the wind guide them as he takes the lead. Gordo’s never felt kindness amongst his own kind, the childhood owed to him being long past overdue.

 

It might have been worth it, if that’s why he has this. Everything would’ve been worth it for them.

 

VII.

 

Curtis Matheson didn’t fly with them, and Gordo would never let him.

 

He reminds Gordo of a cukoo bird. Awful and dishonest. They’re known for laying their eggs in the nests of other birds, pushing the real eggs out to break onto the ground below and leaving the mother to raise a changeling child instead of  her own.

 

When he left, Gordo felt nothing short of selfish relief. The egg belonged to him now, no matter what he hatched as. Gordo would keep him safe.

 

VIII.

 

Gordo had forgotten what being alone felt like until he was.

 

Thomas had lost his son and Mark had lost his mind. He tore up the town, ripping the foundations out from under it and watching it collapse if only to catch a clue of where Joe could be.

 

“Calm down,” Gordo commanded, grabbing Mark by the arm and pulling him away from a clearly terrified human.

 

“Calm down?” Mark seethed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, my nephew is fucking gone. Someone robbed him from his fucking cradle and we didn’t fucking stop it. We’ve already failed him, I’m not going to fail him again by pretending nothing’s wrong.”

 

“You were threatening a human,” Gordo says with all of his unkindness. “You were baring your teeth at a fucking human. If you had followed through, it would’ve landed you not only in exile but in jail. You can’t look for Joe from behind bars, Mark.”

 

“Fuck you,” Mark spits out, but doesn’t argue any more.

 

In four hours, Elizabeth receives a call. Everyone in the house besides Gordo can hear it, the sounds of breaking bones and screams unmistakable even through the receiver, Joe’s voice even more so.

 

In six hours, Gordo throws Mark’s wolf back in his face.

 

In eight hours, the Bennetts are gone.

 

In nine hours, Gordo has cried all the tears he had left from a life of letting them build up inside him out of his body, still shaking from the effort. He still doesn’t regret it.

 

Gordo is both an artist and a canvas, and with that in mind he was bound to make mistakes.

 

Mistakes were easily fixed though, with new designs and color schemes far darker than that of previous years.

 

A lamb, dressed head to toe in wolf’s clothing, to be drawn directly over the brightly colored wolf. Gordo had slaved over the design, no longer having Elizabeth’s help to perfect the intricacies. It is purely his own, and purely Ox.

 

Gordo is both an artist and a canvas. He decides alone what he does with his body.

 

That doesn’t mean that the needle in his skin doesn’t hurt, that the tattoo doesn’t ache, that he’s never surprised to look down at his heart and find that he’d discovered another more worthy of its place.

 

What it does mean, is that Gordo is over Mark Bennett, in every sense of the word.

 

X.

 

Mark Bennett is back in town, and Gordo is a canvas and an artist but most importantly a liar. He had forgotten that the ink stayed, even covered by a darker shade, and Mark had stained Gordo so much deeper than the ink.

 

He vowed to last at least a year until falling back into Mark’s arms. They were inevitable and undeniable, but Gordo had forever to try and deny.

 

XI.

 

Gordo Livingstone lasted eleven years before the loss became unbearable, before the hole in his heart that had been left more than a decade before became too big to fill with anything smaller than Mark’s kiss.

 

Gordo Livingstone lasted eleven years, and now had a pack of wolves circling his left ring finger. Mark had an unkindness.

 

It was more than enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> ty'all for reading!! i hope u liked it!!


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